


every little piece in your life

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode Related, F/M, Future Fic, Introspection, POV Phil Coulson, Romance, Skoulson RomFest 2k15 REDUX, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, implied civil war references, skoulsonfest2k15redux, some emotional crap etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 13:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4393934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coulson has been compromised by Skye. Over and over.</p><p>Written for the Skoulson RomFest 2k15 Redux - Prompt: compromised</p>
            </blockquote>





	every little piece in your life

**one**

Agent Hand calls her a non-agent, talks as if she were an enemy of SHIELD.

Coulson wonders why he keeps doing this, pushing this. Skye is valuable, yes – she'll be a great field agent some day, she'll be a great asset, she has already saved their asses a couple of times. But she's not the first talented person he's met. Not the first talented person he's misjudged or mistreated, either. He wonders why he's being so stubborn about this. He has tried hard not to examine a lot of the things going on with him since he came back – because he's not sure everything is all right, he's not sure he came back from Tahiti (it's a magical place) the way he should have. It's not just that he feels different, it's that he _knows_ he is.

He's trying very hard not to examine why Skye, the role she plays in all this, why she affects him so much, why he finds her so indispensable in his new team and his new life. Why he can't imagine...

He can see why other might suspect the worst. He can see why Hand makes those accusations without really making them.

HQ doesn't know everything, and that's part of the problem.

Coulson hasn't let the details of Skye's involvement with Miles Lydon and her role in the Hong Kong snafu end up on any official report. Skye's real reason for joining SHIELD is even more of a secret. A secret he intends to keep and knows he probably can't.

She disobeys his orders again, directly, when she is already on such thin ice. She cares very little for the consequences to herself. She quietly accepts when May telling Agent Hand that Skye was the one who shot Sitwell, just because that way they avoid the mention on Simmons' record, they avoid the possible investigation. She takes that hit, because that way it's easier for everybody else, including Coulson. Yet she was willing to squander his good faith by going around his back again, willing to give up the chance to find some sliver of information about her parents, just to protect the team. Coulson realizes this and feels humbled in her presence.

Afterwards the only reason why Fitz and Ward are not dead right now, collaretal damage left behind in a Russian compound, is bacause Skye said to hell with protocol and Coulson doesn't think he could ever thank her enough for that. So instead he lies to her.

 

 

**two**

"How was the ride from Istanbul?"

 _What are you doing?_ he asks himself, in the few moments while Fitz scrambles for the password and Garrett claims ignorance. What the hell are you doing and how the hell have you come to be here. Here, outside a secret SHIELD facility he has no business knowing it even exists. Here, willing to go as far as it takes.

Hours later two men (men who were only following orders, like he did once) are dead and he is sitting by Skye's bed in the med-pod. He knows he could never look at her again without seeing the horrors he now remembers on his own skin. It's always going to be connected now – what they did to his body, what he's done to hers. But he couldn't let her go. He couldn't let her die and he couldn't let them give her that alien blood and he couldn't take revenge. This is not the person he used to be. He's never gone this far, he's never fought this hard for anything in his whole life. Not even to keep alive. He let his own life slip through his fingers without effort, and yet he clutches hers tightly.

To be so unravelled by a twenty-four year old. A twenty-four year old so clear-eyed, so clear-hearted.

When she wakes up the terror Coulson feels that she might hate him for what he's done to her is nothing compared to the terror of what might happen to her. Because of what he did.

 

 

**three**

He watches her closely the days after he gives her the first pictures with the symbols. The Playground's cameras won't cut it right now. He needs to stay alert. He watches and stays close and Skye mistakes it for proximity, maybe intimacy, and she seems happy about it and Coulson can't stand all the lies behind that happiness.

He's afraid she'll start carving like him and when she doesn't and when she still doesn't, after weeks, Coulson realizes this is what he should have been afraid of, not the carving.

"You're sleeping all right?" he asks one day, pushing too far, in case Skye is not telling him something (he can't put cameras in her bunk, after all, and Skye is not the most communicative person when it comes to the bad things). He doesn't know why her experience should be like his, where the compulsion comes at him in dreams and wakes him up only late at night, but in so many things Skye had turned out to be so alike him that he just assumed.

Skye looks at him curiously, because it's not a question he would make, not even when they are at their closest.

"Yeah," she replies, suspicious. She touches her own face. "Why? Do I look bad or something?"

Coulson doesn't answer and they go on with whatever they are doing and he realizes that keeping this up, monitoring her, hiding things from her, it can never be possible unless he steps back. Unless he stays away from her.

 

 

**four**

"She has to go in the Index. It's the only way we can help her."

May is right of course. May has been historically wrong about a lot of stuff when it comes to Skye, but she's right in this.

He knows. It's not like he doesn't know.

It's actually writing the thing in. Filling in the categories. She's not a category. Like he's a assessing a threat. Skye is not a threat (the Kree called her _a weapon_ oh god, Coulson feels a shiver down his spine and the sour taste of importence whenever he thinks about it). Giving her file a new number. She's not just an agent anymore.

(Are you sure you want to put yourself as her handler? a voice inside him prods at him. Skye doesn't have anyone else, and he would want anyone else to have that responsibility)

How many times has he done this before? He forgets.

He wonders if the Index is really the only way to help her. (he knows it will keep her safe for the moment, but safe is not enough, safe is contained and isolated in that cell – she shouldn't be in a cell, _safe_ is safe for everybody else, which is what Skye wants but not what Coulson wants and not what Skye deserves)

He used to feel differently. The Index is good, the Index is necessary. The Index protects people. But that was before. Before Hydra. Before dying. Before – 

He's never put someone he loves in the Index, that's all.

 

 

**five**

"Did she drag you down there or were you curious?"

 _I went down that city to die_ , Coulson thinks, but the truth would have sounded even more incriminating to someone like Gonzalez. Coulson went down there to die with her, because if he couldn't save her –and he knew he couldn't, there wasn't time, and he wasn't good enough– he would make sure she didn't die alone.

He shouldn't be here anyway. He shouldn't be alive. He knows he came back wrong. He thought that dying just to make sure Skye wasn't on her own down there was worth it, was the perfect ending.

He thinks about it while he drinks with Hunter, he thinks about a lot of things he shouldn't think about, while Hunter snores unattractively sprayed on the couch and Coulson devises a very bad plan to find Skye. He doesn't sleep that night, not even after finding a way to contact Mike. He sits on the kitchen table (the cupboards still filled with the stuff he bought for her, and when Coulson sees it, the food, he realizes there's no atonement for what he did, trying to lock her up, trying to keep her away). He sits in the darkness and thinks about this strange borrowed time he's been given. He should not be alive, but since everything else that has happened to him has to do with Skye maybe this does too. Maybe he's been given this extra moments, this extra breath, so he can do something for her. And if that something is not that he can die for her, maybe it is that he should live for her.

 

 

**six**

"You're protecting a monster, Coulson."

Talbot's voice sounds as kind as it go under the circumstances. He's trying to let Coulson off the hook. They've been through enough scrapes together. Talbot is not a friend exactly, but they have come to count on each other.

And thought most of the papers still treat her like a hero Coulson knows that's going to change soon. It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and he wishes Skye was here to hear him make that joke, and he wonders if she's too young to know those lyrics. He's glad she's not here right now, he's glad she's gone often – well not glad for himself, but things are starting to go in a direction he doesn't like, is not able to stop. He would like to stop all this, for her. Stop the suspicions, the hurtful words that will soon be levelled at people like her. Stop the emergency measures and fear. But he can't, and he'd rather Skye doesn't see him try and fail.

Once more it seems like away from him is the only place she's really safe and if she is a curse ("death follows") maybe in turn Coulson is _her_ curse as well.

 

 

**seven**

It takes him a while to find her, and he only manages because she wanted him to.

She's in Mexico and if it weren't for Lincoln's instructions and Coulson's Spanish-speaking skills he would have never found the place.

After the semi-illicit meetings in parks and dark corners and underground parkings, while Coulson tried to fake a neutral face to the world before he loses all his privileges and can't help anymore, it feels weird to be meeting in a beach, with the sun in his eyes and a lot of witnesses. Inhuman witnesses.

Off the grid, but in plain sight.

She explains that there are small communities like this one all over the world now, in hiding. Skye is the resistance, but these people aren't. They just want to survive, not fight. She'll help them with that and them move on.

"You can't stay here," she says while they walk along the water, Coulson with his shoes in his hand and his pants rolled up, so out of place among the people who look like they have spent most of the year here.

"I know," he says.

He notices the looks he gets. Suspicion at best, terror at worst. He doesn't blame them – he's SHIELD, or used to be. And SHIELD are their enemy right now. He knows he can't stay. And he has only seen Skye sporadically – and minutes at a time – these last six months.

He wanted to find her –he always wants to find her, he needs it, he needs her– but not just for her.

"I'm just trying to help them," he tells her.

"I know that," Skye says. "They don't know that."

They keep walking on the sand until the sun sets, catching up with each other. Skye underplays the struggles of being a superhero when superheroes have been outlawed, like she underplays everything. She asks about the rest of the team, her voice broken by the longing for their old lives.

They go back to the camp for dinner and Coulson can observe up close how everyone here, except Lincoln, is watching him with worry. This might pose a problem, he needs the Inhumans to cooperate even when Skye isn't there.

"These people trust you," he tells Skye, taking her aside a bit. "Can't you convince them to let me help?"

"They do trust me. But not when it comes to you," she adds.

He's surprised by that. "Why not?"

"They know we have... history. They believe I'm not exactly objective when you are involved. They think I'm _compromised_." She gives the word a little embarrassed laugh and Coulson wonders if she has any idea how many times he has heard that word applied to their relationship. 

She takes his hand. Coulson accepts the gesture on impulse, not knowing what it means right now, and wraps his own fingers around hers.

"Well. They're _right_ ," she says.

Squeezing his hand Skye reaches out and presses her mouth, close and chaste and all too briefly, to Coulson's.

He can hear the sea behind them.

Skye smiles at him as she pulls back. She smiles, looking unsure about the whole thing.

"I'm sorry for telling you this in less than desireable circumstances," she adds. "I don't need an answer right now. Just... think about the question, okay?"

Coulson can't reply to it, dumbstruck and stunned by her offer.

Her fingers slip from under his, leaving a trace of warmth and confusion on his skin. She walks away, turning to look back at him for just a moment before her features get swallowed by the darkness. Footsteps on sand don't make any noise so she disappears and Coulson can't even listen to her walking away. He is left looking after pitch black darkness and the sounds of waves crashing on the beach.

"She thinks she's going to die in this war," Lincoln, who had been listening to the whole thing, the whole surprising exchange, from aside, tells him. "She's convinced."

"That's why she said all that? Just now." Coulson asks, desperate for an explanation.

"Is that what you think?" the younger man says, giving Coulson a curiously hard expression. "I've spent the best part of this year following Skye's orders, holed up in safe houses with her, patching her multiple wounds. I've learned one thing about her: Skye knows what she wants."

Coulson doesn't doubt Skye. Like always, he doubts himself.

He's unable to answer her right now and he leaves the place without an answer.

 

 

**eight**

She comes back to the base – what's left of it, they are working on that problem – but only when it's safe for her to do so. But she comes back the moment it's safe for her to do so. When the papers have gone back to calling her a hero. They meet again among ruins, among agents and workers cleaning up those ruins and putting up next walls and windows.

She grabs his shoulders, fingers digging into his suit painfully but he won't complain as she pulls him into an embrace, Coulson stroking the back of her neck and realizing how long it's been because her hair is so long now. She's safe, in one piece, a bit brusied but they all are. She's safe and in the open and here to stay and she is hugging him like she – 

"Please tell me you have missed me," she _pleads_ , brushing her lips against his earlobe. "Please tell me you have been thinking about me."

Coulson tucks his head into the curve of her neck, giving her a silent, unmistakeable answer this time.

 

 

**nine**

Afterwards (many afterwards after that, in fact, because they needed to be with each other twice, three times, before they could even speak again) they explore each other's fresh wounds, soldier curiously studying another soldier, thin emergency blankets and a bedside lamp for only light. They inquire cuts and scratches and calculate the days they've been apart by how fast old wounds have healed. No one disturbs him tonight because everybody is busy and they are too smart to disturb them _tonight_.

Skye presses the pad of her index to the bruised spot on his nose over and over, joking about sexy boxer injuries, while he worries about all the weight she's lost since he last saw her, promising to cook his flashiest, tastiest dishes for her as soon as the base's kitchen gets rebuilt, tempting her with talk of mouth-watering delicacies. They speak in whispers in a temporary bunk they hastily occupied. Skye examines his bruises just as avidly (she tells him he's lost weight too, he didn't know she would notice such things), getting angry in retrospect at whoever caused them, promising Coulson to protect him from now on, applying light kisses to the most tender parts as balm.

"What happened to your robot hand?" she asks, while she caresses the old scarred skin of his stump tenderly, revelling in every part of him, even the parts he thinks are ugly.

"Got totalled in a fight," he explains.

"Did you at least win the fight?"

"Of course."

She chuckles.

"Are you getting a new one?"

"I guess. But there's no hurry. I don't need to be out in the field right now. I want to focus on rebuilding SHIELD after... after everything."

"Okay."

"And then there's this woman I'm seeing..." he adds, pressing a bold smile against Skye's mouth.

"Yeah?"

"I would like to spend some time with her," he tells her. "She asked me something some time ago. I'd like to give her an answer."

"Okay," she nods, so close that the nodding has her nosing his collarbone. She teases him: "Tell me about this woman, then. Is she pretty?"

Coulson laughs.

She looks at him like she wants to swallow the vibrations he's making in this moment, or bottle them, to keep them in her pocket forever. She looks – _unravelled_ by him. Which Coulson finds incomprehensible but he's not about to question it and he hopes it lasts a long time. He kisses the side of her neck and remembers how she had looked that night in Mexico, on the beach, and how much time he had wasted, thinking he was unable to return her feelings.

Skye sighs at his kisses and runs her hand over his side, above his ribcage, but not touching him, just vibrating the air over his skin. Coulson shivers, stunned by how good that feels.

"You've become very precise with that," he tells her, trying to hide the embarrassing extent of his wonderment and desire for her in this moment.

"Coulson, you're gonna love my new skills," she says, an unmistakable twinkle in her eye.

Coulson thinks about this last year. All the places she must have visited, the extraordinary people she must have met.

"Did you get the chance to try this out with someone?" he asks, and he realizes how that sounds. "Sorry, that's none of my business, that's not why I –"

"I didn't," she replies and he has complicated feelings about it; he would have wanted her to have someone. "And yeah, it's none of your business, Director, but the superhero life is pretty lonely."

"I'm sorry," he says, kissing her again, feeling the recently split lip under his kiss. Soldiers kissing soldiers. "I'm sorry you were lonely."

"I was hoping you could help out with that," Skye tells him.

And he shouldn't be alive, Coulson knows. But maybe, he thinks, _this_ is the reason why he is.

 

 

**ten**

"Sir," the agent –he's new down here, young and fresh-faced, tranferred from Weaver's base, now that they need more help, a lot more help– says as he slips Coulson some documents to officially approve. He's not much inside his office these days, so people have to catch him like this, coming and going through the base. The poor guy has probably looking for the Director for a while.

Coulson catches sight of Skye passing through the next hallways. She seems in a hurry and concentrated but she turns her head a moment and flashes a smile his way.

The young recruit points towards the hallway – once Skye is gone – with a shocked expression. Coulson definitely enjoys this part of his job.

"Is that...?"

"Yes, that's her," Coulson says casually, without looking up from the files.

He finishes checking the paperwork but the other man is obviously no longer interested.

"They told me that I might see her," the agent rants. "That you and Quake were – that you worked together, sir. But I never thought that I'd be sharing the same space with her."

Coulson bears his words with grace, like it has nothing do with him. He's going to have fun telling Skye all about it later that night. 

"She's amazing, isn't she?" the young recruit says, still looking in the direction Skye left.

Coulson smiles. "She is."

Then again, he's never been exactly impartial.


End file.
